Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

Hello and welcome back to the Healthcare Success podcast.

Today I am going to cover an extremely important topic. Talking about the world of zero click. And Brandon, as some of you may know, leads our digital department and especially SEO.

Brandon is super uber qualified. And those of you who don’t know him and who won’t spend time talking about that today, except that welcome Brandon.

Good to jump into all the details today.

Brandon Schakola (Healthcare Success)

Thanks for having me back. Yeah.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

Yeah, so you know, Brandon, we talk. As our team like almost on a daily basis about how search is changing today and the zero click environment thanks in part to AI but not slowly to AI is really a hot topic in the world of marketing and clearly we have prospects we talk to every day clients we talk to every day about how search is changing and that’s why we’re talking today but before we jump into the zero click world I think it’s important to note that it’s been going on for a while so I’d like to start about what does zero click mean how is that involved how long has it been going on give our listeners some context about this very important topic

@2:00 – Brandon Schakola (Healthcare Success)

Yeah so I think one of the reasons it’s resurfaced is because Rand Fishkin you know now works with Spark Toro does you know a lot of these you know studies and data stories around the world of search and he has been you know since years ago when he was part of MOZ, originally SEO MOZ, and over time as search has changed, you know, if we were looking back at like 2010, for instance, we were just starting to get, you know, images, we’re starting to get video, we’re starting to get map packs, things like that, and the search results, and that was changing the behavior outside of the standard 10 blue links that we were all kind of used to.

And so that, over time, progressed, eventually Rand, you know, left MOS and left it in good hands, but he began doing these stories about, you know, what’s changing.

So, after recently getting things like images, right, you would still get traffic sometimes for images, if that was what it was a product someone was looking for, oh, this is what I want, it’s the thing, and they click on the thing and so as Google continues to like, evolve the search engine experience.

it started getting divvied up into specific verticals, right? shopping functions and needs different experiences than, say, healthcare and healthcare searches.

Or maybe different than someone just like looking to see where their local, like, acne, store is. Those are all different kinds of search intents and search behaviors.

And so, over time, they begin to include more and more things. They begin to include, like, direct answers in the search results, where you would get the answer right at the top of what the question you were asking.

And might be the question that you may have been asking wasn’t even possible before, say, 2013, when, you know, Hummingbird came out, right?

People were then starting with voice search. And so, we had to be able to start parsing questions instead of these exact match search terms.

So, these are ways that search changed with, with all of this behavior. So, within that, If you have a direct answer showing up at the top of the search result, if people got their answer, they’re good, They’re not going to click through to see what the source of the answer was necessarily.

They got what they needed and they’re gone. And so that began this whole idea of like, well, where are the clicks going?

they just staying in Google’s property? Shouldn’t they have, shouldn’t my site have gotten the credit for it? And you might, right?

You might get your link attributed and someone who’s very curious might go through to see if you’re a legitimate company in the first place and then possibly purchase or take some sort of action.

As that continued to expand, we got other search features like People Also Ask. Well, if you start looking at People Also Ask, it’s normally a set of say like four or five questions that show up in various positions, know, interspersed between the standard 10 blue links on top of images on top of video on top of Map packs, all of these other experiences.

one starts interacting with people also ask, it automatically appends additional questions to the bottom. If you keep going, able like infinitely expand.

So even though the standard positions of the 10 blue links haven’t actually changed in terms of order, there’s something else in between taking up that visibility.

So in traditional SEO, you might have and equation for the SEO saying that all right, well, there’s 10,000 in search volume. And then that actual volume gets distributed across all US searches.

And so, you know, we’re a national company. So we got this 10,000 searches, which is our addressable market that’s out there.

But then the reality is you then also have paid search taking up those positions. So paid search is going to nibble away at, I don’t know, you know, traditionally paid search was about 20 to 30% of all clicks.

SEO was between 70 to 80% of all. clicks and then as these new features start coming into place, it’s nibbling away at that click per position, right?

So you have visibility, how many eyeballs are you to see if you’re in positions one to three or one to five?

Well, if positions one to three and one to five are taken up by paid search, taking up the first three, organic positions get pushed below the fold, right?

So that’s visibility. So then your visibility is impacting your click-through rate based on position. That’s kind of least the standard, let’s call it the standard Newtonian model of SEO.

With the inclusion of these SERP features, which often get tested at different positions, you know, in some cases the map pack takes up the entire spread above the fold You may or may not get paid search.

So what we’re seeing is this evolution of Google testing. What is the best experience for that user intent? for that for that information seeking behavior.

And so again what we’re looking at is like the equation is changing right because of these new features. If someone’s you know someone was just looking for an image and they sell they solved their problem.

They got the image they wanted and they’re good. If someone is you know looking to do shopping and just this week there was you know Google rolling out AI comparative shopping experiences.

Well great for the person shopping maybe not so great if you’re an aggregator. Right? I mean that’s like because your whole thing is like hey we can do this comparison thing on our site.

We’ve been doing it for a decade. really helps us. It’s awesome. But great but you know who’s product is now taking that?

Who gets the credit who gets the click? So those I think are why this is coming back up especially with the aggressive way that

AI overviews has been rolling out. So let me pause because let me make sure that I’ve kind of given at least some context, some history of like why we are where we are and why this topic is coming back.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

Yes, absolutely that was great. So, AI has accelerated this and you know obviously people are concerned about ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI tools that people are using and we’re seeing AI results showing up in search results as well.

So you know the zero-click part has been long-standing but the AI has accelerated that and you and I have talked about search has changed more rapidly than any time I remember and apparently you as well.

In fact one of the quotes I saw from a Google CEO warning that search is going to change profoundly in 2025.

So I’d love you to talk a little bit about that. Like, what’s happening from your perspective in terms of the speed and AI in general?

Brandon Schakola (Healthcare Success)

Well, so well, we probably should also discuss it’s not technically AI. It’s not like artificial general intelligence. It’s a large language model, right?

It mimics enough to almost pass the Turing test, which for sci-fi geeks, they’ll understand what that means. But if a piece of software is able to trick a human being into thinking that it’s real, then it’s real, right?

Who else does it say that it is? So there’s lots of ways to find out about the difference between large language models and what is or is not intelligent.

But essentially what these large language models are doing, they are statistical models that look at the probability of words in a specific order, in a specific topic.

space and use that context to try to probabilistically and stochastically in some ways recreate and generate sentences based on probabilities, not necessarily based on grammar, or in the ways that those of us who study Chomsky might think about language and linguistics and things like that.

So these have been around for a long time. Eliza was kind of the first one, which probably shouldn’t pollute the conversation with a bunch of AI talk.

But essentially, you have a large corpus of documents, which is easy to get from the web. They process those documents.

In early search, the way that this would work with information-seeking is you might strip off word endings like firm endings or plurals or stuff like that.

Anybody who gets kind of like the root words, and then you would count up the number of times that word showed up in X number of documents and that’s how you ranked right it was this it was this like that’s what brought on keyword stuffing and those with the practices in SEO originally but as that as this natural language processing discipline progressed it had to solve different challenges, right? in the way that people search so thus we got changes in match types it was no longer exact match we got broad match phrase match fuzzy match and that really isn’t meeting the needs of the way that us humans seek information we ask questions about the world we don’t just blurt out terms we’re seeking things we were a little more progressive than that right?

there are certain things that those older NLP models couldn’t do they couldn’t do disambiguation for instance right?
Bank

So if the word bank, it can be different parts of speech, it can be a noun, it can be a verb, right?

And those might have different contexts. I’m banking a curve, or I’m banking my money. Like there are two different usages in terms of syntax.

But it’s the words around them that help to frame that context. So essentially, there’s a probability that curve shows up in a certain distance of the word banking, or bank, versus riverbank, right?

And then maybe a specific order that those sit in. So those probabilities help to start defining the topic space.

It gets into more complicated math. You know, you have a lot of people talk about vectors and vector spaces.

That’s basically like turning everywhere into a number and its relationship to each other in a hyperspace. So and now we’re like back in Star Trek world. But where all of this is going is if in our information-seeking behavior, are we just looking for a summary of something?

In a lot of cases, most people are. So these large language models are really good at that. They’re really good at summarizing information.

They’re not so great at real-time facts. That’s one way to look at it. Long way of saying, in some cases, the standard 10 blue links function for people.

In other ways, they don’t. They just fail miserably. Wil Reynolds recently when I was at Brighton SEO in San Diego, the SEO conference.

just talking about the experience of shopping for a car. Shopping for a car needs a bit of family. needs to have X number of seats.

I want it to be a hybrid. There’s all of these properties of a car that we might be looking for.

If you try to shop for a car via a normal search, it’s a pain to do, right? You’re like spending hours like trolling through pages with many sites and review blogs and whatever.

But if you go to a large language model like ChatGPT and say you’re looking for these specific things, can you create a table for me and give me back with which types of vehicle might solve my problem, it just does it, right?

That’s an experience. You’ve got precisely what you needed. So, with search, actually, the right way to solve that problem.

And that is a problem with SEO. Not everyone needs it. They may need a different experience.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

I think when we talk about this, you know, you and I both love the sort of tech world early adopter kind of mentality.

as this first came out, ChatGPT, we’re both playing with this really quickly, and in other models as well.

And the sort of where you were just going, the subjectiveness of that. I was preparing for a meeting where I was speaking and about senior living, and I wanted to get examples of house of brand vs. branded house quickly.

And I already had some ideas, but I asked the machine, pull that together, and it gave me, all three models gave me different answers.

One was actually just wrong, but it was helpful. And it saved me a lot of time, because I could go through the top 50 brands and senior living and try to figure out which ones have technically had a house of brands or branded house that’s really slow.

So by using the large model, I was able to come up with something that was more subjective. It didn’t require me to click through a bunch of links.

And that’s really where we are today. And let’s talk about, though, as we’ve talked about sort of how this works.

And we’ve talked about how this is changing. Clearly, we are seeing the rise in the People using these tools, uh, meteorically, we’re also seeing now on our own website and our client’s websites, chat GBT, for example, is the leading one showing up as a source of traffic.

So that’s happening more. Um, still small percentage numbers, but still a lot. And the, we expect that to just completely accelerate.

So the, I guess the first thing is. Do we care? Like, how do we respond to this? know, the SEO dead? Is the large language models taking over? Is there nothing we do? Are we helpless? Help me, Brandon? Help me. We’ve got to sort through this. We’re not totally helpless, right?

Brandon Schakola (Healthcare Success)

Um, and I would think about it as intense and like where, which intents are AI overviews showing up for most.

And in a lot of cases, what we’ve seen from the various studies, know, SEM rush put out of amazing one just last week, you know, and these are all in the trails of, you know, Rand’s latest posts on zero click searches.

So there is constantly more pressure coming in on the one hand of how much traffic is staying inside of Google’s space, right?

That’s the Facebook strategy, keep everyone in the little garden, Google’s doing the same, they wanted to be the source of information, right?

That was part of their, well, it’s part of their nice way of putting their objective. But a certain amount of that traffic has to flow through, it’s part of their monetization as a business, right?

You know, the whole ad business of the web, you know, it’s what funds most of what they do, that users click on things that people can advertise and pay for.

So if I think the scarier thing is just how much of that staying in that zero-click world. So that means that information.

Informational searches are likely going to suffer more pressure. More of that kind of content and intent may go into more of the GPT and AI experiences, Perplexity, cloth, you know, a missed role, et cetera.

It’s also putting pressure on click-through rates for paid and organic across the board. AI overviews is something that Google as a business hasn’t fully properly monetized yet, although they’re testing it.

Perplexity has talked about having an advertising model that allows you to bid on the next possible question, right? So, there’s more probability involved in the whole sequence.

So, I think in terms of some things that we can do is start thinking more about the user journey.

What’s the set? What’s the tree diagram of the potential questions a person that could possibly use your services or products?

go through, right? So we’re back to marketing 101. Like, what’s my fit? How do I help them get to the purchase?

How do I get them to get to the sign-up? What are the questions that I road blocks that I need to remove for them?

So a lot of it’s, in fact, basic marketing, remove the friction points. But it’s also, are you where people can find you?

And so there’s those two wings. So paid search is going to take care of part of that, right? Paid search is typically bottom of funnel and end of consumer journey, right?

They’re at the purchase, the goal phase. Whereas SEO is a channel tensile function that’s spread between their end awareness.

And oftentimes functions in the post-purchase, part of it as well. people are seeking reviews as they’re starting their journey into awareness.

So that’s one thing that we can do. Another is if we look at the traffic that’s coming into a website, you know, how much of that is informational intent? How much of that is that purchase intent? It’s going to be more salient for paid search.

It could be more salient for display in some cases or paid social, whereas SEO just has that spread, right?

So where do you want to focus your energy in terms of SEO? Is it on site or should you maybe doing some things that are, you know, a little more about increasing your brand voice?

And that’s kind of that blend where you get into, you know, paid organic social meets digital PR, content marketing, right?

Although it doesn’t play into the large language models directly, the brand mention is important. Sorry, go ahead. Sorry, I thought you had a question.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

Sorry. Yeah. I was going to say the let’s talk about that in a moment. I want to talk more about Be everywhere.

one of things we’ve talked about is the SEO fundamentals. Those are not dead, and those are informing the large language models.

Before we pivot, because I do want to talk about Be everywhere, but just in terms of the SEO fundamentals, what should we be doing?

Is my hypothesis right that the fundamentals to apply or should we be doing something else like what matters today, and what do you see that trend going?

Brandon Schakola (Healthcare Success)

So, the basics of SEO for organic search still operate, right? There’s your technical foundation, right? Is your content discoverable through either external links pointing into the site, your own internal linking, the ability to find your brand?

So, if Google can’t crawl your content via links, it’s not discoverable. It means it’s not even in the queue to get into the index.

And then once it’s in the index, how good your content is. is how on topic it is, how close it is to solving that user intent of the search to begin with, that determines where you rank, right?

So, Google’s looking at the user behavior in the search to say, great, they had a good experience on this page.

Let’s keep this one. They didn’t have such a good experience on this page. page load took too long. They bounced back to the search results, probably not the best experience for our audience.

So those basics will hold. Now, in majority of spaces, we don’t see the same kind of differentiation in audience intent as we do in healthcare.

In healthcare, we tend to see desktop tends to be more research, mobile tends to be more like, I have to solve this now.

And so, most of the clicks we tend to see in healthcare come through mobile, right? So, there’s two different behaviors and almost two different audiences on their journey.

Now, where this gets trickier. here for standard SEO is understanding how you can separate out those audiences, optimized for the mobile experience, mind you, Google’s also crawling using a mobile dot to find and index your content.

So that impacts both of those audience journeys. So those fundamentals stay the same. It’s now then about how well you’re matching those two to different intents.

And if we know that informational intent could be answered 60% of the time in the search result and not to bring it to your site.

Okay, but did you get the brand recognition, right? That’s the marketing side of SEO, right? The visibility, the brand repetition everywhere you can find it, that still works.

And it still works for paid as well. It’s the informational intent where we’re first starting to see the impact.

And the AI overviews in this case are summarizing. a bunch of search results and then floating that up. And there are different studies about, well, if you’re showing up in the AI overviews, you’re most likely not in the top five links of the standard 10 blue links.

So, does it mean anything to write position one to three, or does it still, right? Those are questions we’re still like observing and answering in real time.

But that means we need to adjust as marketers to different layers of visibility. So that’s where things like content marketing, digital PR still kind of come into play.

Because large language models aren’t built on the same index that Google has. Although if we’re paying attention to the moves that Google made just recently and blocking a bunch of tools that we’re doing rank tracking, that wasn’t just about rank tracking.

That was about other AI bots trying to use Google search results to build their large language model. So, both of those things were going on at the same time.

Now, what that means in terms of a shift in the fundamentals of the way SEO works, I think last time we talked about, you know, let’s talk about queries rather than keywords, the query is what matters, Google’s breaking down a question into parts, like it’s asked if I’m asking something about a person.

So, the results that come back or the answer needs to be in the context of a person, you know, that’s an entity rather than a keyword, right?

So, we’re looking at a shift between the ways that we’re optimizing copy, the way that we’re optimizing experiences to fit around them.

So, every large language model is going to have a different source or set of sources that it’s using the built-in model.

And I think for how we head into this new world of AI experiences and, you know, kudos everyone having their own personalized

search engine, like on their own machines, which is possible, it’s very possible even now. That changes the game. It’s not just about your website as a source, it’s not that it’ll ever fully go away, but what are the other sources that are trusted by the models?

And so, in a weird way, it’s almost like we’re back in the 2010 years of link building, and I’ve got to get a link from this high domain authority site, and that sort of thing, where in this case, it’s almost more like brand mentioned, you know, as your brand visible, people talk about it as your brand visible on Reddit, and we should all go do that.

And then, next thing, you Reddit becomes the least reliable source of information, because all the SEOs went there and did read stuff.

I think we need to take a more a little bit more level-headed approach, right? Are there new sources that you should be a part of local business?

Are you Building or those relationships with your local radio, your local news, all those things that one, reinforce the local authority that you should have, also the local context that you play in the community.

So, anyway.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

Yeah. me summarize some important points to bring us back a little bit. Number one, Brandon, you talked about, and just for our listeners, because you’re hitting them with so much, it’s a lot.

And I’ll try to paraphrase a couple of things. One is the, you know, Google, thinkg about Google. 80% 90% of revenue comes from pay per click.

all that other stuff, the phones, the Google Home, that’s nothing. It’s all paid search. the, you know, they’re bleeding.

We have their wrapped attention in Mountain View to say the least. So, what’s happening though, predictably, and this first came out, I was thinking, okay, high funnel stuff, really more research kind of stuff. That’s going to lend

itself really well towards, you know, these large language models where after you’re thinking about intense signals, those ones that Google wants to monetize anyway.

So, you know, for example, what is healthcare versus medical? I don’t know if anybody’s going to pay money for that search phrase, right?

Like, that’s really a fuzzy, there’s actually a, I actually have research this to make sure I get my nomenclature right when we’re doing our marketing, but, you know, there are subtle differences there, but nobody pays for that.

So, those can be, those are the kinds of things where I think everybody’s pretty well served by just getting straight to a quick answer, right?

Or, for example, Brandon, we’re going to be doing an internal training for our healthcare success university about healthcare for our new employees talking about what’s a PPO versus an HMO versus an MSO versus an ACO versus ACA versus, and I know all this stuff, right?

I’ve been doing this for many decades, but I need to have a quick answer to teach the employees in the right words.

So, I was, went back to the, at large language models to summarize it for me to give a little glossary to my team without having to write it all out.

Nobody’s going to pay for those terms. But what’s the best HMO on Aetna’s Plan in Southern California Oh, that might be something that becomes more intent-driven, or what’s the best insurance company for health plan where for Medicare Advantage, now you’re getting very intent-driven.

I think it will be interesting to see, but clearly the very high funnel, very just sort of informational stuff.

Nobody’s paying for that anyway. The Commerce terms people will pay a form. So that’s number one. Number two, we talked a little bit about, you know, what does SEO stuff work?

And the answer is yes, because the large language models are going and crawling the sites just like Google is and learning off of these things.

So, it has to be there. can’t make up stuff that’s not there, right? So we’ve talked offline about, what was your thing about organic

Like running shoes and what does that mean like it has to have if there’s it will help a lot if you have content that would help Explain that because yeah, you know, maybe they can draw conclusions, the more Specific you are the better and then the third thing where we’re leaning into now is be everywhere and so Be everywhere is what all the people in the industry are talking about and it is interesting because it is like You know in the old days We talked you know the whole google algorithm and those of you that follow me for a long time I’ve talked about actually about the book about Google’s founding and how I’ll just cover this real quick the whole idea of Google in the early days was the research papers that are cited most often Are the most important in other words if somebody sites a research paper over and over again, it’s therefore important That was the aha that links matter.

That’s where that all came from. So, links were really important Of course the game. There’s a whole book on this there is do why but so the But so that became

about links directly, then about citations, and then we talked about how things evolved, how things were game, but just like you said, it’s coming back to it in a way, maybe not as much links, but citations, mentions on the web, in many multiple channels, and that’s when we start thinking about, okay, how do you be everywhere, and what’s the most effective way to be everywhere?

So for example, Brandon and I were talking about before we got started today about our own content, and it’s interesting that, you know, we’ve had in the old days tens of thousands of engaged readers through email, and that was all invisible to anybody else, because it was all by email.

Today, we have about 5,000 engaged readers, but we have more engagement, or at least certainly comparable engagement, on LinkedIn and other sources, so people are consuming our content through LinkedIn, through our podcast, through our webinars, through video, through our speeches, so it’s not as clear-cut as our website, because our website still matters, and all that stuff is still on our website, but we’re making sure to distrubite that content

that effort for taking us so much energy to create content. We want to leverage that content and distribute it everywhere.

And then we have to be very careful which ones, which channels we choose because we only have so much time and so many resources.

And so that’s what we do for our clients as well. And Brandon, for the uninitiated, if you could just share a 30 second message about digital PR and what that means because I think that’s an important way of looking at this.

I think you referred to it a moment ago, but some people may not be as familiar with that term.

Brandon Schakola (Healthcare Success)

Yeah, I mean, standard PR, you would buy placement for your brand to show up at the Super Bowl, right?

It’s got a part of that, right? And the digital world, it operates in kind of different and somewhat sneakier ways sometimes.

I mean, there was the example of the Super Bowl years ago when all the power went out. The Oreo example, if you remember that one,

because they’d had their whole art team over at Oreo daily, just putting out a new Oreo image through Twitter at time, I think.

But at that moment, because they had been doing that practice, they were just ready. And they were just like, oh, you can still dunk in the dark.

Boom, you would have never made a production between Oreo and the Super Bowl, right? was like marketing magic. But that’s a wild example of a digital PR.

But in this case, let’s say you could be a local healthcare business that maybe helps with sports physicals or something.

How involved are you actually in your community? you helping to sponsor that local baseball team or soccer team or football team or hockey team or whatever?

Because again, that’s brand recognition. It’s having a relationship with the brand. In Digital PR, you can make some of those connections as well on top of that, kind of building your brand base, building your community, building your levels of interaction through local news, local radio stations, people who are doing podcasts in the local area that are kind of popular and get suggested through whatever Spotify algorithm or whatnot.

Digital PR can have just has more strategic reach and a lot of minutes than offline PR. So, the just ways of getting your brand more visibility in a way that they be more tied to the local community and what you’re operating.

So, it’s a way of connecting meet space to meet space, so MEET space to MEET space, right, they just can come together.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

So the the and I think this is an important topic that as we as our clients and advise others

to really lean into this and figure out one of the things that, you know, my team has heard me talk about a million times in the 80-20 rule, right?

What is the 20% of effort that gives 80% of results? And that’s where we’re spending a lot of our energy with ourselves and with our clients is, okay, what are those levers we can pull?

And there’s specific tools we’re using that are expensive and new that help us, you know, sort of sort through that new technologies are coming out really fast, so it’s a fun time to be a digital SEO nerd right now.

it’ll be really interesting, by the way, if they change it from SEO, search engine optimization to online optimization or some other term, because it’s bigger than search engines now, right?

Brandon Schakola (Healthcare Success)

Yeah, just a lot of people talking, you know, you’ve got Michael King and other folks talking about, you know, should we need a new term for this?

the OLA COP had a survey about it. And possibly right, Mike said something like, you know, we should probably stop calling ourselves SEO at this point, we’re actually kind of a bit more like feature engineer.

which is a bit more on the money, but ultimately where LLMs and FCO, they do still have kind of the bit of the same foundation, right?

It is going to be based on content, it is going to be based on you demonstrating expertise. If, you know, every other, you know, physician has the same kinds of content around the same kinds of services they offer across the United States, does Google or another bot need to index your content.

It is up there, right?

Google even said this in their recent guidelines. So having an authentic voice, having an authentic perspective on the services you offer, think is going to be a big piece of that.

Yeah, just to wrap up that point, real quick, optimizing for LLMs may at some point come down to like, are you in the seed set of source?

is that they’re trusting to begin with. I think you and I saw some data recently were like, that’s what the LLM’s using?

Like, are you kidding me?

How did you do this with it?

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

Gary, what he’s referring to is we’re looking at a client, and one of the big terms was off of a pay-to-play pub.

we’re like, wait, that’s not an authority. But no, you’re getting wrong. Where do I respond to letter?

Brandon Schakola (Healthcare Success)

And some will try to gain that. But I think the slow and steady approach of most brands does need to be that case of, like, where’s your interaction coming from?

And focus on that in the user journeys. Whether not you’re in another channel. Yeah.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

So I was going to say that I’m talking to one of my other colleagues the other day, it was interesting. Their input was that it’s kind of like back in the days when you put white tape or white type on a white background and game Google’s SEO algorithm.

And their point was that for a short period of time, You really want to game the bots for LLM’s It’s it’s gameable. Like when you start understanding what’s happening, you can start gaming it. Not that we want to, but it’s possible. You’re not in yes, Brandon.

Brandon Schakola (Healthcare Success)

Well, it’s possible. But that’s also what, you know, invoked the next round of people’s outcome updates, which were all penalties.

So the case you’re talking about now, like I remember when JCPenney got basically delisted from all of Google’s index.

During the holiday season, because some of the like the web devs decided to put out free HTML CSS templates that were hiding like, you know, bed sheets.

And some guy decided to use that template for his auto blog, right? was like really simple footprints that Google was able to identify.

And we’ll see the same thing. Being what about a month ago, which is like don’t hide prompts in your code on your website, because there were people trying to do that.

and game the system. So, let’s fight against the increased crappification of the web where we can.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

Yep. So I’ve got about six minutes left here. The, so some quick answers here. Should I panic if I’m losing traffic?

Brandon Schakola (Healthcare Success)

Was the traffic meaningful to begin with? I mean, come on, Stuart. We would be able to get page where we get traffic on the website.

think that has somebody to do with Caduceus. Does that ever brought in revenue for you?

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

I wasn’t talking about it specifically, but yes.

Brandon Schakola (Healthcare Success)

so exactly. Every website has that moment. And oftentimes like Google will just say, yeah, you know what, this probably isn’t really useful to you.

Anyway, we’re just going to clean this up for you.

And I do that in various algorithm updates. No, so if you’re losing traffic, you should take a step back in triage.

Like, was that traffic actually really valuable for you? And, and then go. Okay, well, how do we create more of what’s actually working for us?

What’s really bringing in something of value? Now, that is where I would hunker down. Don’t panic from the get-go.

You know, there are behaviors that will need to monitor over time, like how much is your referral traffic shifting from, say, Google or Bing into GPT, Perplexity, those sorts of areas.

We’ll leave you monitoring, you know, how much AI overviews are showing up. Are they benefiting you if you do show up?

And so, Kevin Endig was just showing some data, I think, earlier today, in cases where people are showing up in AI overviews, and there is a link back to the source, the engagement coming from that link is actually higher.

So, we’re in this time, we’re just starting to get initial reads on this, and how we’re going to, you know, how we’re going to look to use it.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

Good. So last question is, we talked a little bit about this, but in case there’s anything else, to future-proof, what are the priorities?

And maybe some of this is recap way to just describe. just to make it clear for our readers, what are the things, the levers, we should be thinking about pulling now, and how do you think that’ll change in the near future?

Brandon Schakola (Healthcare Success)

I think with your evergreen content, to me, the content that’s permanent on your site about your services or whatnot, constantly developing your brand voice and your individual perspective of your business within those services is going to be critical, I think.

In terms of other areas where you may be doing more timely content, your blogs, you may want to consider just taking some time to plan some consolidation.

You probably have some stable content that just doesn’t even matter anymore. OK, we’ll archive it. Clean it up give new space for what’s new and what’s a bit more timely and relevant You know the healthcare world is constantly shifting, right?

So, I remember recently a good example is I Don’t remember where this discussion was taking place but there were some urgent cares that were starting to handle something like mental health services.

It’s like Okay That’s really fascinating You know, so there’s going to be these new opportunities that you’re going to need to make room for so I think that’s the other piece.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success)

So I would say my last comment on this and thank you, Brendan that was awesome That was really lot of information really quickly and we’ll have you back as a frequent guest that today It was such an untimely and important topic We sort of squeezed you into the middle of the program because you’re on as soon as we can but I would say that For their listeners another way of looking at Brandon just

that is, and we’ve talked about this in the past, EEAT, experience, expertise, authority, trust, and we talked about Google, your money, or your life.

And so that’s, I think, going to continue to be important. A lot of things we’re seeing, and just as search evolves to, the brands are becoming more and more important.

It’s harder for a little guy to show up. And so, I would just say that to think about all of these different things.

And to remember that what I’ve told my team about for years is if you’re trying to work in health care, there’s three things that matter, credibility, credibility, and credibility.

So I think these things are all merging. stuff that works offline, if you’re trying to influence HCPs, if you’re trying influence consumers, if you’re trying to influence Google, it comes back to credibility, credibility, credibility, or EEAT, whatever framework.

building that brand, building that authority, building that trust, is vital. you can do that through really good content, but today, which is

It’s actually exciting is distributing that content you work so hard to build over many channels and recognizing that the machines can figure that out now.

Whereas before they weren’t, they were really focused on the website. But now it’s a broader sort of. So what I’m thinking of from Marvel, the universe, the Spider-Verse, I guess, of like, know, the whole package together, as opposed to just your website Your website is still probably star of the show, but it has a lot of supporting actors.

So Brandon, you’re nodding in here. I think we agree. We’re out of time. Brandon, that was awesome today. We’ll do this again.

It’s always fun talking with you, but publicly and also when we’re talking about our clients, but I thought this was a good summary of a lot of the conversations we’ve been having lately.

Brandon Schakola (Healthcare Success)

Yep. Thank you. Bye.